Iris Murdoch - The Sea, the Sea

‘Don’t do anything, I’ll write to you, later.’

‘You promise ?’

‘Yes. I’ll write. Only don’t come.’

‘Won’t you explain?’

‘There’s nothing to explain. Stay here please.’ And she went away.

Dearest Lizzie, I have been reflecting on what you said in your sweet and wise letter, and what you said also when we met at the tower. I have to ask your pardon. I think perhaps that you are right after all. I love you, but it may be that my rather (as you say) ‘abstract’ idea of our being together is not, for either of us, the best expression of that love. We might just create confusion and unhappiness for both. Your ‘suspicions’ of me may indeed be just, and you are not the first one to express such doubts! Perhaps I am by now too much of a restless Don Juan. So let us play it differently. This is not necessarily a sad conclusion, and we must both be realistic, especially as someone else’s happiness is also at stake. I was very touched and impressed by the spectacle of your relationship with Gilbert. It is an achievement and must of course be respected. What does it matter what people exactly ‘are’ to each other, so long as they love and cherish each other and are true to each other? You were so right to emphasize that word. You doubted my capacity to be loyal and I am near enough to sharing your doubts to be anxious for us not to take the risk. It is just as well that we never defined what we expected. We are both fortunate in being happy as we are, and we can simply count our old affectionate friendship, now so happily revived, as a bonus. We don’t want, do we, any more anguish or muddle. You are quite right. I shall respect your wisdom and your wishes and the rights of my old friend Gilbert! It is, as you said, important that we all three like each other; and let us, as you urged, enjoy a free and unpossessive mutual affection. So please forget my original foolish letter, to which you so bravely and rationally responded, and also my somewhat bullying tactics at our last meeting! I am lucky to have friends such as you and Gilbert and I intend to treasure them in a sensible and I hope generous way. I shall look forward to seeing you soon in London where I shall be arriving shortly. I will let you know. Accept, both of you, my affectionate best wishes and, if I may belatedly offer them, my congratulations.

Be well, little Lizzie, and remember me.

Your old friend,

Charles .

This was the letter, partly disingenuous, partly sincere, which I wrote to Lizzie on the afternoon of the day when I saw Hartley in the church for the second time. I returned home in a frenzy of misery and indecision, and after a while spent fruitlessly wondering what to do next, I decided that one sensible thing at least which I could do to pass the time would be to get rid of Lizzie. This involved no mental struggle and no problem except the labour of writing a suitable letter and concentrating upon Lizzie long enough to complete it. How totally in every atom I had been changed was shown by the fact that my ‘idea’ about Lizzie now seemed to me an insane fancy from whose consequences I had been mercifully saved by Lizzie’s own common sense; and for this I blessed her. A flame had licked out of the past and burnt up that structure of intentions completely. What had been made clear in the last two days (which seemed like months) was how far I had been right in thinking that there was only one real love in my life. It was as if I had in some spiritual sense actually married Hartley long ago and was simply not free to look elsewhere. Of course I had really known this all along. But on seeing her again the sense of absolute belongingness had been overwhelming; in the teeth of our fates’ most exquisite cruelty, in the teeth of all the evidence, we belonged to each other.

I did in fact manage to think quite intensely about Lizzie while I was writing the letter, and to think of her with a kind of generous resigned affection. I saw her laughing radiant face as it had been when she was younger, when we used to laugh so much about her loving me. In spite of the incredible gaucherie of my ‘idea’ it was possible that I had, quite accidentally, acquired Lizzie as a friend whose affection and loyalty might even one day be of value. But now the decks must be cleared. There must be absolutely no problem, no ‘interesting connection’ involving discussions or letters or visits. I had no time and no strength for any such muddle and it would be criminal to risk one. My hint about coming to London was of course simply a ploy to keep Lizzie there. I could not have endured the arrival of an emotional Lizzie on my doorstep now. There had been a slaughter of all my other interests, and upon the strange white open scene of the future only one thing remained. So let little Lizzie remain safely in storage with Gilbert; I could now even feel benevolent towards him. Was this new detached generosity, I wondered in passing, a first symptom of that changed and purified form of being which the return of Hartley was going to create in me? Was Hartley, seen not touched, loved not possessed, destined to make me a saint? How strange and significant that I had come precisely here to repent of my egoism! Was this perhaps the final sense of my mystical marriage with my only love? It was an extreme idea, but it had its own deep logic, and flourished somewhat upon the absence of alternatives. There was, for me, surely no other move?

I was of course aware that one point of the ‘extreme idea’ was that it consoled me with an offer of happiness, though of an extremely refined and attenuated sort. Other prospects, more closely related to the horror of recent events, were less vague and less pleasing; and I had an urgent dark desire to act which was not illumined by my aspirations to sanctity. But what could I do? Start looking for Titus? My central question at least was now answered: Hartley was unhappy. But this brought forward a further central question. Why was she unhappy? Was it simply because her son had vanished or were there other reasons? Why would she not let me help her, why would she not let me in ? Or was it naïve to expect confidences from a woman I had not seen for more than forty years? I had kept her being alive in me, but to her I might simply be a shadow, an almost forgotten schoolboy. I could not believe this. Was she perhaps on the contrary still so much in love with me that she dare not trust herself to see me? Did she imagine I had smart handsome mistresses of whom she would be miserably jealous? What had she been doing down on the sea road when Rosina’s headlights suddenly revealed her to me? Had she come to spy, to find out?

She had promised to write, but would she write, and if she did would she ‘explain’? Could I, was I capable of it, simply wait, and perhaps wait and wait, for that letter, and, obeying her, do nothing? I so intensely wanted to ‘explain’ myself, to pour out everything I felt and thought, and which in those miserable scrappy encounters I had not managed to say. Should I write her a long letter? If I did I would certainly not entrust it to the post. That brought me back again to le mari. Why was she unhappy? Was it because he was jealous, a tyrant, a bully, who never let anyone come near her? Was that it? And if so… How my mind leapt forward at this thought, and how many lurid vistas and fiery hollows were suddenly opened up. At the same time I knew that sanity, and a faithfulness to Hartley which must be kept untainted, forbade this kind of speculation.

I had no heart to cook lunch. I fried an egg but could not eat it. I drank some of the young Beaujolais which had been delivered from the Raven Hotel. (I found the wine, Beaujolais and some Spanish stuff, outside the door when I got back from the village.) Then I occupied myself by writing the letter to Lizzie which I have copied out above. After that I thought it might do my soul some good if I went swimming. The tide was in and the sea was very calm, and clearer than usual. Looking down from my cliff before I dived in I could see tall dark trees of seaweed gently waving and fishes swimming between them. I swam about quietly, looking at that special ‘swimmer’s view’ of the sea, and feeling, for the time, possessing and possessed. The sea was a glassy slightly heaving plain, moving slowly past me, and as if it were shrugging reflectively as it absent-mindedly supported its devotee. Some large seagulls with the yellowest conceivable beaks gathered to watch me. I felt no anxiety about getting out, and when I swam back to my cliff face I was able quite easily to cling on to my handholds and footholds and pull myself up out of the water. In fact the little cliff is not in itself very hard to climb, it is just that, as I explained, if one is being constantly lifted up and abruptly dropped again by the movement of the waves, it is impossible to keep one’s fingers and toes in place long enough to get a proper grip. When I was in the sea I thought to myself how little it mattered to me that Hartley was no longer beautiful. This seemed a good thought and I held on to it and it brought me, together with tenderness, a little calm.